O processo de desenvolvimento da competência linguística em inglês na perspectiva da complexidade

Abstract

This PhD dissertation investigates the linguistic competence of a teacher of English, this researchs participant, who attended a continuous education course. The courses syllabus covered topics whose main aim was to improve its students linguistic production in the target language, as well as to discuss theoretical and methodological issues concerning the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language. This research aims to understand the way the participants linguistic competence in English evolved, by using complex systems as an orienting theory. Complex systems theory looks at dynamism,interactions, and different relationships of parts of one specific phenomenon through holistic lens, which allows to see this dissertations object of analysis from a relational perspective. This research consists of a case-study, under the light of ethnography, which tries to uncover the systematic observation the researcher has made during two years of fieldwork. Throughout the observationperiod, data were collected by means of field notes, tape-recording, interviews, and learning narratives produced by the participant, the latter split into four versions and categorized in both oral as well as written registers. The data analysis emphasized the dynamism that usually characterized the developmental process of the participants linguistic competence, by focusing on the fundamental features of adaptative dynamic systems, such as: nonlinearity, self-organization, variability, and emergence. To do so, the linguistic competence was analyzed by means of qualitative and quantitative methods.The influence of diverse inter-related contextual factors, typical of theparticipants linguistic competence development, was also taken into account. The results have shown that this development does not take place in the different linguistic sub-systems in identical ways. This development does not also happen in a linear standard, neither in a crescendum, as if it had a target spot well defined and delineated. On the contrary, this research emphasizes that the linguistic competence development process, from an emergentism perspective, took place by inter-relating various factors, at different time-scale levels. Consequently, we can conclude that this development occurs by means of non-linearity and unpredictability, permeated by instabilities and variability.